Mathematical Biology Seminar

Fred Adler
University of Utah
3:05PM, Wednesday, March 9, 2011
LCB 219
The virtues of waiting, procrastinating and avoiding conflict

Abstract: Ants are among the most successful organisms on earth, not least because they have created an impression of being hard-working automatons who put even graduate students to shame. I will show that ants might in fact succeed in part through waiting for other individuals to make the hard decisions and by avoiding stressful situations. Unfortunately, I have not quite gotten around to proving these results, but will give a sketch of how they could be demonstrated.